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THE OLD COLLEGE AND THE NEW. 



By 

CHARLES W. DABNEY, JR., 
President of the University of Tennessee. 





THE OLD COLLEGE AND THE NEW 



AN ADDRESS 

Delivered at the Commencement of the Vii"y;inia Polytechnic 
Institute, Hlacksljuru;, Vii^inia, June 24, 18Q(), 



CHARLES W. DABNEY, JR., 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE. 



PRIVATELY PRINTED. 
1896. 



3)^ 



V^ 



GIFT 

MW. WOODROW WILSON 

NOV. 25, 1939 



THE OLD COLLEGE AND THE NEW. 

Twenty-five years ago a Virginia college boy, on a summer's tramp 
through these grand mountains, climbed late/one Saturday evening over 
the hills to the eastward yonder and saw the sun set on the beautiful 
valley that holds this then, as to day, good, quiet town of Blacksburg, 
Hospitable friends entertained him over Sunday and gave him an 
opportunity to see all there was in those days of this college. After 
twenty-five years that college boy is here once more to enjoy that hos- 
pitality, which, like everything else in old Virginia, " never tires," and 
to see that college once more, or rather to see the magnificent new insti- 
tution which has been buill upon the foundations of the old college. 

We thought it a good college then, but how much grander and better 
it is to-day ! Your visitor of twenty-five years ago is amazed at what he 
sees, testifying, as it does, to the wisdom, enterjirise, and liberality of the 
good people of Virginia, Then we saw here a very small institution, 
scarcely more than an academy ; to-day we behold a great polytechnic 
institute, a collection of lecture-rooms and libraries, of great shops and 
extensive laboratories, of experimental farms and well equipped facto- 
ries, planned especially for the liberal and practical education of youth. 

These wonderful changes suggest the thoughts of the hour. This, the 
first commencement of the reorganized institution, now called the Vir- 
ginia Polytechnic Institute, seems a fitting occasion to consider what 
has been accomplished in education in Virginia and in the South. By 
scanning carefully the way we have come, we shall perhaps find useful 
directions for our future journeys. 

The old soldier had cherished throughout the entire war the tenderest 
memories of the dear children at home, and his first efi'ort, after the 
restoration of peace and the rehabilitation of his home, was to provide 
for their education. The command of their great captain had been to 
go home, take care of their families and build up the country, and he 
had set them a noble example by his own act. " I shall devote my life 
now to training young men to do their duty in life," said Robert E. Lee 
when he gave up the command of an army and took command of a col- 
lege, and the great intellect and noble heart once consecrated to the 
defense of his country were thenceforward dedicated to the education of 
its youth. The same purpose actuated his brave followers. Many old 
soldiers became school teachers and the younger men who had been 
fighting when under other circumstances they would have been study- 
ing, addressed themselves, upon the close of the contest, to the business 
of getting an education. Many a one-legged veteran who could not 



follow the plow now commanded the forces in an old field school, and 
many a crippled soldier boy joined the class because disqualified for 
the farm or shop. As teachers they were strict and faithful, if not 
always skilled in methods, and as students they were earnest and 
appreciative, although backward, or rusty. The war was itself a great 
training school, and our country never had a nobler generation of men 
than the ones thus educated. They are the men who have done most 
of the grand work of which we shall learn to-day ; they are the men 
who have built this splendid institution. 

In 1870 there were not over forty colleges open in the States from 
Maryland to Florida, and Missouri to Texas. Soon, however, academies 
and colleges sprang up all over the country, and they have continued to 
multiply ever since. The report of the United States Commissioner of 
Education for 1892-93 shows that these same States, including Mary- 
land and Missouri, had in that fiscal year 145 colleges and universities of 
different kinds, giving bachelor and higher degrees. Some scholars 
now question indeed whether we have not too many of them, in pro- 
portion to our resources. 

As the great universities of Europe grew out of monastic and cathedral 
schools, so our older American colleges were nearly all the children of 
the churches. The preachers were in the early days almost the only 
learned men, and therefore the only teachers. In the case of the country 
schools the good old dominie, most often a Scotch Presbyterian minister, 
taught the children during the week, as he did the grown folk on Sun- 
day, and thus laid at the same time the foundations of both religion 
and education. The institutions for higher education were nearly 
all founded by the presbyteries, associations, or conventions of the 
different denominations, and the most learned and devout of their 
clergy became the instructors. With few exceptions, all of our 
prominent institutions were founded upon, or grew out of, church 
colleges. Such was the origin of many of the older ones, as William 
and Mary, Hampden-Sidney, and Washington and Lee, in Virginia ; 
Davidson, in North Carolina ; Washington, in Tennessee ; the State 
universities of North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee; and among 
those of more recent origin, of Roanoke, Randolph-Macon, and Emory 
and Henry, in Virginia; Wake Forest, in North Carolina; Vanderbilt, 
in Tennessee ; and many others. 

The founders and early professors of these colleges were among the 
noblest men of their day. In the true spirit of consecration, they gave 
their lives to the cause of sound learning and the greater glory of God. 
Patient, self sacrificing, and long suffering, they had difficulties to over- 
come of which we know nothing. The teacher of to-day can draw, not 
only encouragement, but real profit, from a study of the trials, the pri- 
vations, the long-protracted struggles, and the unrequited labors of these 
pioneers in education who read Virgil with their pupils under the trees 
and taught geometry from figures drawn on the ground. Grand heroes 
were the Reverend John Brown, the founder of Liberty Hall, now 
Washington and Lee University, in Virginia, and also of Kentucky 
Academy, afterwards Transylvania University ; the Reverend David 
Caldwell, who, as the master of Guilford Academy, in North Carolina, 



educated the men who founded the Commonwealth and provided for a 
State University in its first constitution ; the Reverend Moses Waddel, 
who at Willington, in South Carolina, and afterwards at Franklin Col- 
lege, in Georgia, educated the great men and laid the foundations of the 
educational institutions of these two States; the Reverend Samuel 
Doak, the parent of East Tennessee schools; the Reverend Samuel 
Carrick, first president of Blount College ; the Reverend Philip Linds- 
ley, the founder of the University of Nashville, and the many other 
teaching-preachers of those early times. These men were as true 
patriots and heroes as any of those others who faced the Indian in the 
western forest or the redcoat on the eastern seaboard. 

Naturally enough, as their founders and teachers were all preachers, 
these earliest colleges were devoted almost exclusively to the cultiva- 
tion of theology, classics, and philosophy. Their parson-teachers taught 
what they held to be the only things worth learning, and they were 
right in putting character and culture above everything else, though 
they were compelled to omit important elements of training. 

Because they were the parents of the school and college of to-day, 
let us look more closely at the school and college of the first decade 
after the civil war. 

First go with me to visit one of those old parsons' schools. 
The_ church and schoolhouse were near together, as the preacher 
ministered in them both. At the foot of a ridge, covered with forest, 
and just above the road which followed around a worm fence inclos- 
ing a fertile meadow, stood the plain buildings, one large and one small, 
like the mother and daughter they really were. A plank fence inclosed 
a plot of ground in the center of which was the square brick church, 
with white plastered gable and whitened columns in front. The school- 
house (or " session house," as it was called from the fact that those " grave 
and reverend seigniors," the elders, met there) stood in one corner of 
this inclosure. Two stiles at the front corners of this yard afforded a 
convenient mounting place for the blushing maidens who usually con- 
trived to spend a long time getting into or out of their black riding skirts, 
chatting merrily the while with the brown-cheeked fellows who held 
the horses' bits or helped the little feet find the hidden stirrups— for 
all thesweethearting had to be confined to the dismounting and the 
mounting. After the men entered the door on the right and the women 
that on the left, communication was limited to such stolen glances as 
the good elders, seated in the " amen " corners, could not detect. The 
preacher thundered at his people from his high white throne until the 
wicked trembled and the righteous went to sleep. 

But when a protracted meeting came around, what a great time the 
boys and girls had during the midday recess over the lunch baskets 
under the trees, or strolling through the woods, or down to the spring ! 
Those were the grand feast days of the country. When the school was 
suspended, after such a " season of blessing," what a -week or two of 
fresh air was theirs, filled with bright sunshine and sweet smiles ; with 
glorious old hymns, solemn sermons, and earnest prayers ! But after 
that big Sunday when the whole country was there and the religious 
harvest was gathered in, how dreary was the old church, when early 



Monday morning the boys returned once more to school, and how 
sad were the woods and even the murmuring spring ! Fortunately for 
them the dominie was so worn out and listless that for a day or two 
they were allowed to do pretty much what they liked and had plenty 
of time to think of the sweet girls, the toothsome pies, and other good 
things the meeting had brought for them. 

In that square brick, shingle-roofed schoolhouse, with three windows, 
one chimney, and a door, the parson kept school five days in the week 
and six months in the year. Thither we traveled early each week-day 
morning on our frisky young colts, or our equally active bare feet, and 
there, in spite of the pins and paper projectiles, in spite of the pepper or 
sulphur on the stove and the consequent unexpected recess, in spite of 
the frostbites in winter and the stone bruises in summer, in spite of 
the protracted meetings and the blue eyes of the girls, we learned a little 
Latin, Greek, arithmetic, and catechism. Our "patent school furni- 
ture" was slab-boards with stick legs, the lower boards to sit on, the 
higher ones to hold books and to write on. Nobody wanted any charts, 
globes, or apparatus in those days. There was the boy, the book, the 
teacher — and the hickory. Anything else would have been in the way. 

Oar particular dear old parson, although a pretty fair teacher of Latin 
grammar, according to Ruddiman, and having some knowledge of Greek 
as far as the Anabasis and the New Testament, had no liking for algebra 
and geometry, and was, therefore, exceedingly strict with those classes 
when they came up before him. If a boy could not " work it," or 
" prove it," without his assistance, he was in very great danger of the 
hickory. This may account for the fact that that particular boy learned 
more geometry and algebra than anything else. The work was all done 
at the point of the hickory, so to speak, and as a result the boy who 
went to this school and tells this tale does not recall that he had the 
slightest ambition, or took any marked interest in anything, unless it 
was the girls, the colts, and the squirrels. In his opinion the best 
teacher he had about that time was the kindly old neighborhood loafer 
who roamed the woods with him, told him of the times of the wild 
flowers and the habits of the birds, and taught him to shoot the long 
rifle. He followed the " natural method " and showed a pupil how to 
do a thing by doing it. 

But after awhile came the college, with its first two years devoted 
entirely to Latin, Greek, and mathematics during the week, and church 
and Bible class on Sunday. In the junior year the student was intro- 
duced into the mysteries of natural philosophy and mental philosophy, 
as they were called in those days; and in the senior year, in addition 
to the Latin and Greek, which continued to the end, although the math- 
ematics had been dropped, there were brief courses in chemistry and 
geology, and better ones in logic, ethics, and the history of philosophy. 
This was the educational course which led to the degree of "Artium 
Liberalium Baccalaureus," the receipt of which convinced the lad, for 
the time being at least, that his education was as complete and as thor- 
ough as it was possible to be. 

But the awakening came soon enough ! Unless he had a large fortune 
and could retire upon a plantation to lead the charming, though Intel- 



lectually enervating, life of the country gentleman, the graduate of this 
classical curriculum soon found that his real education was just begin- 
ning. " Commencement " was passed, but now the question was, with this 
preparation, what was he to commence ? If honest, he must answer with 
Faust : 

"I've now, alas! philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence, too, 
And to my cost theology with ardent labor studied through, 
And here I stand with all my lore, 
Poor fool, no wiser than before." 

If he felt any genuine ambition, this young man usually taught school 
for a while and finally studied law, medicine, or theology. Besides these 
there was no work for the classical graduate. As poor Hawthorne 
expressed it in a letter to his mother : "I can not become a physician and 
live by men's diseases ; I can not be a lawyer, and live by their quarrels; 
I can not be a clergyman, and live by their sins. I suppose there is 
nothing left for me but to write books." In writing books Hawthorne 
certainly made good use of his education. But America has had but 
one Hawthorne. So it came about that the South, with the whole 
country, was filled to overflowing with the followers of these so called 
learned professions, and had no chemists, engineers, or manufacturers. 

The errors of those days grew largely out of false conceptions of the 
character and relations of teacher and pupil. The popular conception 
of the scholar was a cyclopaedia of information from which any one 
could borrow a fact, as we take a book from the circulating library — 
a vast storehouse of supplies, kept up for the benefit of the community, 
upon which any one could draw for whatever he wanted. Naturalists 
say there is a family of ants in Mexico which habitually sets apart some 
of its members to act as honey-jars, or storage vats, in which to deposit 
the sweets collected from the fields by their industrious brethren. These 
poor ants are imprisoned at home and made to practice extending their 
abdomens until they can contain a large amount of precious nectar, 
which they then keep " on tap " for the benefit of the entire conamunity. 
It is their especial duty, however, to nurse the young, and pump a due 
amount of honey into them each day. This, I think, was the too 
common conception of the nature and duty of the scholar and teacher 
in the olden times. 

The true scholar or teacher is not merely a receptacle for knowledge, 
he is not a drone in the hive, or a honey-jar ant ; he is a worker, a 
gleaner in the fields of science. So our present conception of a college 
is not a storehouse of knowledge merely, or even a rehearsing stage 
where amateurs are taught a few facial expressions or professional 
gestures, in addition to learning their parts and finding their cues; it is 
something more than this. It should be a laboratory for research, a 
real workshop for real workers. Colleges are something more than 
factories for making subjects for examinations. The true teacher is not 
a pump with a big tank back of it ; but a master workman who teaches 
his apprentice by doing it himself, and a guide for the young searcher 
after truth in this earthly wilderness. The student who has found this true 
guide will see beyond the wilderness of college life a land flowing with 
the milk and honey of eternal truth. Our colleges and universities should 
at least raise the student high enough before the end of his course to give 



8 

him a Pisgah view of the land of promise, which stretches far beyond 
the Jordan of examinations and the sweet conquests of commencements. 

Have I drawn too dark a picture of the old-time system of higher 
education? I have tried to point out its weaknesses and abuses, and 
have not time here to speak of its advantages. This is not necessary, 
as you know them. They are seen in many of the men and women 
around me to-day. 

Such, with one or two notable exceptions, were the only schools in 
the South before the war. As there was less commerce and manufac- 
tures, so there was less demand for scientific and technical education in 
the old South than in the old North. A purely literary education suited 
the tastes and demands of the wealthy planter, and these methods pro- 
duced a race of preachers, teachers, lawyers, statesmen, soldiers, poets, 
and orators who have been scarcely equaled and never surpassed. 

The preacher gave the youth of that day only a narrow classical edu- 
cation, but he usually gave him broad moral training. The study of 
languages, literature, and philosophy develops the memory, imagina- 
tion, and taste especially ; the study of science trains the judgment and 
the power of observation. The latter are as necessary as the former to 
make safe observers and safe thinkers, and herein were the chief defi- 
ciencies of the old college. A one-sided system makes many one-sided 
men, and thus the parson's school and college gave the South, besides 
preachers and statesmen, many idle dreamers and impractical theorists. 

Let no one understand me in what I have said, as depreciating the 
value in education of language and literature. Language, the vehicle of 
thought, is absolutely essential, especially a mastery of the mother 
tongue. It is the crystal vial that contains all the potentiality of the 
living present, as literature is the sculptured urn that holds all the 
ashes of the dead past. These are not mere accomplishments; rightly 
viewed and used, they are an inspiration, a lesson, and a guide. Aside 
from their direct, or first uses, the languages are the most perfect educa- 
tional polishing machines. In the gymnasium of the Latin and Greek 
the mind, stripped like the athlete, brings many an intellectual muscle 
into play. Properly used these studies exercise every faculty — obser- 
vation, comparison, and analysis, as well as memory, imagination, and 
taste. Through them the youthful mind grows to a robust manhood, 
so that he, who was but a stripling of a Freshman, finds himself an 
intellectual Hercules when a Senior. For cultivating these faculties of 
the intellect the classics can not be surpassed or substituted. But are 
these the only faculties of men ? The old classical curriculum was good 
as far as it went. The classics are essential, the mother tongue is essen- 
tial, literature and history are essential, but they are not all. 

It is related that an old Emperor of China, who knew that his country 
was kept back by its exclusive devotion to the classics of Confucius, 
invited all the teachers of the Empire to come to Pekin to a grand sym- 
posium and to bring all their well-loved manuscripts with them. They 
came, and after giving them a grand banquet he buried all the profes- 
sor§^ alive with their books in a deep pit. But Confucius still has fol- 
lowers, and neither Greek nor Latin, books nor professors, will ever be 
buried. 



The adaptation of education to a scientific age does not thus involve 
a contest as to whether science or classics shall prevail, for both are 
indispensable to true national, if not individual, education. The real 
question is whether schools will undertake the duty of molding the 
minds of boys according to their mental varieties. The classics may, 
from their structural perfection and power of awakening dormant facul- 
ties, have claims to precedence in education, but they have none to a 
monopoly. The study of nature may sometimes quicken dull minds 
which the classics have failed to arouse. By claiming a monoply for 
the classics these teachers would sacrifice mental receptivity to a Pro- 
crustean uniformity. To illustrate, in the language of an accomplished 
son of Virginia, Col. William Preston Johnston : " What would the 
men of Lynn say if a great shoe syndicate should turn out shoes of one 
size and pattern only, and demand that all the world should wear them ? 
The}' know that the demand would meet a fiat-footed refusal on the 
ground that they will not fit. When urged to believe that the classic 
buskin — a little Latin and less Greek — is for every foot the best, as 
Lord Eldon said, ' I doubt.' And when a scientific curriculum is thrust 
forward — French patent leather — as the sole supporter of the advancing 
step of progress, I can not but remember that Philosophy has her airy 
realms, trodden only by the wing-tipped sandals of Hermes. And 
when again, last of all, comes the young giant. Manual Training, with 
his seven-league boots, shouting, ' Come all ye sons of men, and wear 
these boots, and with them compass land and sea ; they are the best, 
and biggest, and onliest boots of all,' the scholar would fain ask, 'And 
will these wonderful boots lift you to the upper realm of thought ? Land 
and sea — yes, it is true, they will compass these ; but the Heaven and 
the Heaven of Heavens, what of them? ' " No, my friends, though all 
men must be shod, there is no shoe that will fit every foot. The 
foot must be regarded, the path it has to tread, and the load it has to 
bear. 

The harmonious and equitable evolution of man does not mean that 
every man must be educated just like his fellow. The harmony is 
within each individual. That community is most highly educated in 
which each individual has attained the maximum of his possibilities in 
the direction of his peculiar talents and opportunities. This produces 
not a Procrustean sameness, but an infinite diversity in purpose and 
potentiality. The perfect education is one which tunes every string on 
each human instrument. Each musical instrument must, they tell us, 
in order to develop the most perfect sounds, be tuned separately by a 
sympathetic spirit and a skillful hand. A nation of men and women 
all perfectly educated would be like a grand orchestra of such musical 
instruments, all perfectly tuned. There are hundreds of instruments 
and players, and yet each instrument can make its own peculiar music. 
All are necessary to produce the grand symphony. An orchestra made 
up entirely of like instruments would be no orchestra at all. So the 
life of each man and woman may be a melody, and whether it is the 
loud-pealing hymn of the cathedral organ, or the soft pleading ol the 
Spanish lover's guitar as he sings his serenade, it makes little difference 
what instrument each one plays so he makes music in his life. 



10 

No one shall surpass me in giving praise to the old-time college. For 
giving men character and classical culture it was perhaps unsurpassed 
in its day, but it was deficient in that it did not qualify all its students 
for all the work of life. We can not all be preachers, teachers, or states- 
men, and the great defect of the old college was that it had no training 
for young men who had no taste for the classics, literature, or philoso- 
phy, and were not fitted for the higher walks of professional life. It 
gave a one-sided education. As Emerson said, " We are students of 
words; we are shut up in schools, colleges, and recitation rooms for ten 
or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of 
words, and do not know a thing. We can not use our hands, or our 
legs, or our eyes, or our arms." The old college gave the youth splen- 
did training in the humanities, so-called, but it was deficient in the study 
of nature. " The proper study of mankind is man," but man, his lan- 
guages, literatures, and philosophies, are not the only things in the 
world. Outside of man is the whole world of nature, and man has to 
live and work out his own salvation in accordance with the laws of this 
natural world. The same Creator made all things and declared them 
good. Man is, indeed, fearfully and wonderfully made ; but nature is 
just as full of wisdom and of law and almost as fearful and wonderful, 
as man himself. 

About 1870 the necessity for reform in our system of college educa- 
tion became apparent to us, as it did to scholars in all parts of the 
world ; for the defects mentioned were not peculiar to our country or 
to our time. The movement for scientific and technical education dur- 
ing the last 20 years was world-wide, and the changes made in college 
education in the South were only a part of, and in harmony with, the 
trend of modern thought and industrial development. 

It was otherwise an auspicious time for a change of our system of 
education. A new day had dawned. In 1865 the South awoke sud- 
denly out of mediseval night and found itself in the midst of a scientific 
age and a day of tremendous material development. She commenced 
to appreciate for the first time her birthright of almost boundless 
material resources, and set bravely to work to build up her waste 
places and win back the wealth she had lost. She commenced asking 
herself. What good are coals, iron ores, zinc ores, hard wood, water 
powers, marbles, and such things, unless utihzed ? Why not train our 
own young men to manufacture these things into commercial prod- 
ucts '? Is not the fact that these things still lie in the mountains 
unused chiefly owing to that other fact that we have no men who 
know how to use them ? Hence it was determined that Southern boys, 
at least, should have an opportunity to secure a scientific and technical 
education and thus be quahfied to assist in the development of the 
material resources of the country. As Huxley expresses it, " It is 
folly to continue, in this age of full modern artillery, to train our boys 
to do battle in it equipped only with the sword and shield of the ancient 
gladiator." The chemist's balance or the engineer's transit are better 
instruments for this time. In a scientific age and in an industrial sec- 
tion . an exclusive education in the dead languages was a curious 
anomaly which we hastened to abandon. The flowers of literature 



11 

should indeed be cultivated, but it is not wise to send men into our 
fields of industry to reap the harvest when they have been taught only 
to pick the flowers and push aside the wheat. We wanted to grow rich 
and strong, and here was an honorable and healthful way of doing so. 
As a result, therefore, of these considerations, practical as well as 
philosophical, there has been, between 1870 and the present time, a 
wonderful development in scientific and technical education in the 
South. 

Such were the forces and the necessities which gave rise to an entirely 
new class of institutions in this section. After the wonderful growth 
of all kinds of schools in the South, the most interesting fact in our 
recent history in the rapid development of schools of science and 
technology. The report of the U. S. Bureau of Education for 1892-93, 
just referred to, shows that out of 145 colleges and universities of gen- 
eralcharacter in the South, including Maryland and Missouri, 16 have 
extensive technical departments. In addition to this there are in these 
States 15 agricultural and mechanical colleges (not counting departments 
for colored students as separate ones) ; 2 State schools of technology or 
mining, separate from these colleges; 4 or 5 local technical schools; and 
2 separate military academies — making a total of 40 schools, giving 
instraction in 3cien3e or technology. None of these except the military 
schools existed prior to 1805. The great majority of them were estab- 
lished between 1870 and 1880. 

Time would fail me to mention any of these schools or their work. The 
Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, now well named the 
Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and the Miller Manual Training School 
of Albermarle, are splendid representatives of this class of institution. 
Their scope and work are so well known to you that I may point to 
them without description as the best types of the kind of school that the 
South especially needs. 

Such great changes have taken place in the direction of scientific and 
technical education that the time has come to utter a warning. There 
is danger that we eliminate too much of the old education and make 
the courses of these new institutions too narrow and utilitarian. From 
one extreme we are in danger of going over to the other. The college 
which formerly had only a few months of natural science in the junior 
or senior year now has courses which are called wholly " scientific." 
Even the more conservative church colleges are eliminating Latin and 
Greek at a great rate in order to put in more science, " ologies," etc. So 
it has come about that while once our Southern colleges taught nothing 
besides liberal arts, now many of them have very little of the liberal 
arts left in their courses. 

The "elective system" is the fashion, and the old curriculum is a 
thing of the past. The success of this system in Germany, where the 
freedom to teach whatever one chooses and the freedom to learn what- 
ever one chooses, form part of the chartered rights of the universities, 
is not a proof that the system is the best for our comparatively young 
American colleges. The trouble here is that we have so few thorough 
preparatory schools. The ordinary German gymnasium gives as good 
an education in the humanities as the best of our classical colleges, if 



12 

not better, and the German builds his scientific or technical education 
upon this foundation. Our experiment in scientific education will 
surely fail if we do not prepare our student as the German is prepared. 
Our boy just out of the public high school, with only the elements of 
an English education and perhaps a smattering of Latin and science, 
enters the university and takes up a special course in natural history or 
engineering, in which he gets little additional liberal education. The 
all-too-common product of this course is that intellectual deformity 
which we call a crank — the man of one study, one interest, one idea. 
Such a creature can not make a good citizen, a good teacher, a good 
writer, or even a good safe investigator in his own line, simply because 
he is not a good broad man. The scientist may know the life history 
of a hundred bugs, but he is a dangerous scientist if he does not know 
the history of his own race ; the engineer may have a wonderful com- 
mand of the higher mathematics, but he is a very useless engineer unless 
he knows how to use his own language. From such colleges as this we 
are already getting chemists who believe that nothing exists which they 
can not dissolve, precipitate, and weigh in the balance: biologisis who 
believe that nothing lives which they can not fry in paraflftne, slice in 
thin layers and study under the miscroscope; and engineers who be- 
lieve that nothing has value which they can not calculate in dollars 
and cents, or that any force exists in the universe which they can not 
measure in horse powers, foot pounds, or electrical ohms. If this con- 
dition continues, where will we educate the future thinker, man of 
affairs, teacher, preacher, or statesman ? 

It is time, I think, for a reaction in favor of the liberal arts. The 
remedy for this condition is, as suggested, a thorough preparatory 
course in languages, literature, and history. Our colleges should refuse 
to admit young men to the special scientific or engineering courses until 
they have the elements of a liberal education. 

But I fear worse results than this from the charge of system and the 
total abandonment of the old classical course. There has been a great 
deal of nonsensical talk about the " new " education, " practical " edu- 
cation, "industrial" education, "normal" education, and even "busi- 
ness " education, as if any of them, or all combined, could take the 
place of the old liberal education. As the result of it all, thoughtless 
people have come to the conclusion that a boy needs no education, and 
therefore put him to work in the counting-room or the shop as soon as 
he comes out of the common school. They seem to think that the only 
aim of a boy should be to make money, and to get at it just as soon as 
possible. They take a child out of the common school and either 
apprentice him to business or put him into a so-called business college 
for a few months to be taught a few mechanical methods, so that when 
he ought to be at college he is already astride a bookkeeper's stool, 
measuring calico, or drumming country merchants for a wholesale gro- 
cery or hardware house. The alarming fact is that, as a result of this 
way of doing, less than 6 per cent of the boys in Southern cities and 
towns between the ages of 15 and 21 are at school. 

This system can only be characterized as a " slaughter of the inno- 
cents." The boy's soul is stamped. with the die of the "almighty 



13 

dollar " before it has reached its manhood size. He has not merely lost 
all the inspiration that culture, learning, and liberal education would 
give, but he has had his mind and soul utterly poisoned with the 
things of this world before he has passed through that period of life 
which should be filled with learning, hope, and ambition. With that 
" little learning " which is a " dangerous thing " this poor school boy is 
set afloat in life without ambition, except to get money, and too often 
without character. Behold him ! What is he and what can he do? 
Should he ever develop ambition or character, he will find himself, alas, 
too late for reformation, disqualified to reach any better position. He 
is fitted for no profession except a commercial one, which is, morally 
speaking, the most dangerous calling in the world. He is set adrift on 
the great ocean like a lightly built pleasure bark, worthless for any 
heavy seas, although equipped with costly trappings and with broad 
sails longingly spread to catch every breeze, but without compass to guide 
or engine to drive through the billows against the storm. From this 
uneducated class of business men — these men with wants beyond their 
means of satisfying them — come, as history tells us, the bank defaulters, 
the commercial and municipal thieves and the other gentlemen who 
failing to earn all they want by honest means take it from the bank or 
commercial house and go to Canada. Such a system of education — or 
no education — has filled the country with salesmen, bookkeepers, mer- 
chants, brokers, and many others, too, who call themselves lawyers, 
doctors, and even preachers and teachers, some few, doubtless, honest and 
earnest workers, but many of them living by their wits, from hand to 
mouth, seeking, some of them, to wear clean clothes at the expense of a 
clean conscience, and all desiring to live and make money with the least 
work possible. 

The people who have declaimed against the deficiencies of the old- 
time classical colleges and their one-sided education are partly respon- 
sible for this, though not wholly so. It is one of the tendencies of an 
industrial age and commercial people against which we, as teachers, 
must contend with earnest zeal. The remedy is a system of all-around 
complete education which neglects no part of a man while it trains him 
for the highest service in life. 

The perfect education, as we all now agree, consists of a complete, 
harmonious development of the whole man in his threefold nature — 
physical, intellectual, and moral ; hand, head, and heart. This is very 
trite; but we must often go back to first principles to get right. Any 
system that fails to take into account any one of these three is worse 
tiian useless; it is hurtful, for it distorts the man. 

Oar criticism of the old college was that while it provided a certain 
intellectual discipline which produced magnificent results in some 
instances, it provided no training for the physical man and the senses 
with which he should study nature. Our criticism of the new college 
is that it has too often gone to the opposite extreme and neglected the 
training and furnishing of the mind in its zeal to train the eye and hand 
Both systems have failed to give due attention to man's moral nature — 
to character-building. 

The Bible is the best text-book of education, as of many other sciences. 



14 

In it we read where Paul tells Timothy, his " dearly beloved son in the 
faith," that "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable 
for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness ; 
that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good 
works." Nowhere in literature or philosophy is there a better or clearer 
expression of the true purpose of education than this. The object of 
education is not pleasure, or comfort, or gain, though all these may and 
should result from it. The one true purpose in education is to prepare 
the man for " good works." It is a noble thing to develop a perfect 
soul, to thoroughly furnish a body, mind and heart, but the perfection, 
the furnishing, should result in " good works." 

We are taught also that a man may be perfect, thoroughly furnished ; 
not for one good work merely — not for preaching the Gospel only, as 
glorious a work as that is ; not for healing the body only, as merciful a 
work as that is; not for defending the nation only, as heroic a work as 
that is ; not even for furnishing other souls only, as noble a work as 
that is— but "unto all good works." Men are multiform and life is 
multiform. There are as many callings, in fact, as there are men ; each 
of us has his own peculiar work to do, and for each work a perfect man, 
thoroughly furnished, is required. Every profession in life requires the 
best trainhig ; the business of farming, of mining, of building, or of 
manufacturing, demands a perfect man, just as much as preaching, 
healing, fighting or teaching, and no system of education is correct that 
does not aim to train the whole man harmoniously and completely, 
according to his nature, fitting him for " all good works." 

If the new college has any just claim to superiority, it is because it 
recognizes the fact that the whole man must be trained, the physical as 
well as the intellectual, and that all men must be educated, according 
to their God-given natures, to do, each, his own work. The carpenter 
has the same right to a good education as the teacher, the farmer as the 
physician. The educated man to-day need not hesitate to enter any 
field of human activity since '' all good works " demand the perfect man. 

The new college emphasizes the development of the physical man, 
training the eye and hand, and herein has made a great advance upon 
the old college. But is this all? The perfect education of mind and 
body alone is not enough. It neglects the most important element of 
the man, and therefore will not furnish a soul perfect for all good works. 
What says Paul again ? He tell his son Timothy that the scripture is 
profitable not only for doctrine and correction, but also for instruction 
in righteousness that the man of God may be perfect. After all, then, 
it is instruction in righteousness that makes man perfect. Righteous- 
ness is the finishing touch on the picture, the final tempering of the tool, 
the governor on the engine, the compass of the ship. Righteousness is 
the teacher of conscience, and conscience is the guardian and guide of the 
man What is education worth without righteousness? What is man 
worth without conscience? Just as much as the picture without the finish, 
the tool without temper, the engine without a governor, the ship with- 
out a compass. It is worth nothing ; it is a delusion to its possessor and 
a danger to others. Better not educate a man at all than train only his 
mind and body and leave his character unformed. Culture and edu- 



15 

cation are good in themselves, only as they are used by the perfect 
soul. If you can not give a child a conscience, in the name of all 
that is good do not strengthen and sharpen the powers which he will 
certainly use for his own destruction and the harm of others. Better a 
coarse brute than a cultured sinner ; better a noble savage than a con- 
scienceless savant ; better a wild cowboy than a mean bank-robber ; 
better a brutal Geronimo who slays his enemies openly than an educated 
Guiteau who shoots a President in the back. 

Character-building, conscience-forming, then, is the main object of 
education. The teacher dare not neglect character, the college to provide 
for its development. We must always and everywhere, in every course 
and scheme of study, provide those methods and agencies which shall 
develop the character of the pupil along with his other powers. 

How, then, shall we develop character in our pupils ? What are the 
methods and the agencies for doing this? This is the crucial ques- 
tion of this age, as of every age. To this question all the ages give 
but one answer, and that is, Christianity. The world has had many 
teachers of science, art, and philosophy, but one true teacher of righteous- 
ness and he was Jesus Christ, the Son of God. With all his wisdom and 
learning, man has never invented a system of righteousness to approach 
that in the Sermon on the Mount. So declared Paul, to whom Christ 
appeared as a bright and shining light in the heavens, and who believed 
him God ; and so said Renan, who never saw him and refused to believe 
him God. This is the one great fact in all history, upon which all men 
agree, believers and unbelievers alike, namely, that the righteousness of 
Jesus Christ is the only perfect righteousness, the only system worth 
following in the building of character. 

How, then, can there be any question about teaching it? The 
fact is, no thoughtful person questions this to-day. Not a great 
thinker can be found, not even a materiahst or agnostic, who has the 
hardihood to deny the value and power in character-forming of the 
teachings of Jesus. What say our philosophers, our apostles of culture 
and science ? How, for example, does Matthew Arnold, the prophet 
of "sweetness and light," define culture? The purpose of culture, 
he declares, is not " to make an intelligent being more intelligent," but 
rather " to make reason and the will of God prevail." Hear also Huxley, 
the greatest teacher of natural science our century has produced. In a 
classical paper, well known and often quoted, he says, "That man, I 
think, has had a liberal education whose body has been so trained in 
youth that it is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and 
pleasure all that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a 
clear, cold logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth 
running order, ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of 
work and to spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the 
mind ; whose mind is stored with the knowledge of the great funda- 
mental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations ; one who, no 
stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but Avhose passions have been 
trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender con- 
science ; one who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or 
of art, to hate all vileness and to esteem others as himself." 



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These eloquent words read like a commentary on St. Paul or an ex- 
position of the Sermon on the Mount. Can any one doubt where Huxley 
got his idea of an education that should develop a " vigorous Mali, the 
servant of a tender conscience " and a nature that should " hate all vile- 
ness and esteem others as himself? " No man before Jesus of Nazareth 
ever tavight the brotherhood of all mankind. He was the first to de- 
clare this, the fundamental principle of modern sociology, and every im- 
provement in civilization, in government, and in society, in the last 
eighteen hundred years, may be traced directly to this principle. 

The hope of America is the American college. It is characteristic of 
this college that it has stood faithfully to the ideals of a sound culture ; 
a culture not withdrawn from active life but intimately concerned with 
that life. It was the glory of the old college that it gave to the country 
so many men of culture and character. Never did our country need 
men of moral courage more than now, and it should be the great aim of 
the new college to give it more men of high character, while it trains 
more men with powerful intellects and skilled hands. 

Such should be your chief purpose, honored members of the Board of 
Visitors, in laying out plans for this magnificent institution. Such is 
your most important work, Mr. President and gentlemen of the Faculty, 
in teaching these promising youths ; and such is your solemn duty, young 
men, students of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, while prosecuting 
your courses, to develop that conscience and character which alone can 
pilot men and nations through the storms of our times, and that moral 
courage and unselfish love of all mankind which alone can make us 
benefactors of our race. Young men — you who receive to-day the highest 
testimonials of this institution — one single fact will decide whether that 
education shall be a blessing or a curse to you and all your fellows, and 
that fact is character. With character you will be a boundless blessing; 
without character you will be an infinite curse. Upon you rests this 
awful decision. 

With such a Board to direct, such a Faculty to teach, and such 
students as I see here to- day to learn, we should have little doubt, how- 
ever, that the Virginia Polytechnic Institute will be the training ground 
of many noble leaders of our people in the paths of peace, prosperity, 
and rectitude. Sitting here upon the very crest of these grandest Vir- 
ginian mountains, bathed in the pure air and clear sunlight of a heaven 
that seems to bend lovingly down to meet our spirits, may it be truly a city 
set upon a hill, shedding the light of truth and morality for the guidance 
of all the people of this Commonwealth — a home of the true culture 
which makes perfect men, " thoroughly furnished for every good work," 




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